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La Obra Poetica De Jose De Jesus Dominguez Estudio Preliminar, Texto Y Notas, Eric Samuel Quinones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed an esthetic renewal in Latin American literature. The movement later dubbed modernismo would usher in a profound shift in the ars poetica of Spanish prose and poetry. Yet this revolution did not spread like fire; it coexisted with, and unevenly replaced, earlier artistic notions. José de Jesús Domínguez, a poet and medical doctor who spent most of his life in the city of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was one of the earliest exponents of this trend. His evolution from his beginnings as a romantic poet, his encounter with the French Parnassians, and his early …

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism, Anne Donlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism considers the work of several intersecting figures in transnational modernism, in order to reassess the contours of race and gender in anglophone literature of the interwar period in the U.S. and Europe. Writers and organizers experimented with literary form and print culture to build and maintain networks of internationalism. This dissertation begins to suggest some of these maps of connection, paying particular attention to people who played key roles as hubs within networks. British radical Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920s publications, which have not been much considered in terms of literary contribution, …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …

Musical Landscapes: Theophile Gautier And The Evolution Of Nineteenth Century French Poetry, Dana Milstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theophile Gautier's first edition of Emaux et camees (1852) marks the juncture at which Romantic, Neoclassical, and nascent Symbolist poetic theories converged under the umbrella ideology of "Parnassianism." Emaux et camees synthesizes the aesthetics promoted by these diverse groups, primarily by 1) using "musical" and "painterly" language, 2) emphasizing correspondences among arts, and 3) paradoxically demanding an attention to form and the artist's labor while also emphasizing art's inutility during a century characterized by Progress. Gautier's Emaux et camees bridges painterly and musical poetics to create a new model for poetry.

While the vocabulary of painting captivated many nineteenth century …

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

Wordsworth, Ruins, And The Dialectics Of Melancholia, Colin Dekeersgieter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The concept of melancholia as it pertains to Romantic poets is often relegated to its simpler meaning of gloomy or depressed. This work provides an analysis of the motifs of melancholia in the work William Wordsworth as an allegory of the artist's relationship to their art. I am interested in melancholia as the tension between the melancholic's acute awareness of his temporal actuality and the grave desire for transcendence as a poet. Operating within this dialectic fractures Wordsworth's interiority as he struggles to ground himself in both realms. This dialectic is most often reconciled when the poet finds a …